Republicans at play

The two major parties have been in the process of nominating their respective slates of candidates for the fall elections lately, but their ways of going about it have been very different.

The usually rambunctious Democrats conducted very business-like affairs with no surprises in both their borough and state conventions. The party’s ticket is headed by gubernatorial nominee Andrew Cuomo statewide and Rep. Michael McMahon locally.

The usually buttoned-down Republican conventions were stormy by comparison.

On Staten Island, the GOP inexplicably first nominated scandal-tainted Vito Fossella to try for his old congressional seat amid much controversy and then selected Michael Allegretti for Congress after Mr. Fossella demurred.

The Republicans’ statewide convention was even more entertaining, if sturm und drang are your thing. District Attorney Daniel Donovan became one of a handful of Staten Islanders ever nominated for statewide office when he was named the GOP’s candidate for attorney general, but that was peaceful compared to the rest of the convention.

The real fireworks came when the fractious Republicans, after a three-hour floor fight, nominated Rick Lazio, who lost badly to Hillary Clinton in the 2000 Senate race, to be Mr. Cuomo’s opponent. Longtime Suffolk County official and recent Republican convert Steve Levy came in second with 28.4 percent of the vote.

Mr. Lazio immediately called for party unity, but it was clear that wasn’t happening. Both opponents refused to get out of the race.

The candidate who put on the most notable performance in this defiance was Buffalo developer Carl Paladino, purportedly the Tea Party activists’ preferred candidate.

The Erie County maverick got just under 8 percent of the delegates’ votes when all was said and done, but made it sound like he got robbed.

In a fiery speech in which he seized the microphone to nominate himself, he said, “I’m up here because our party leaders have blocked us from speaking. That’s dysfunctional, that’s ridiculous and that’s flat-out wrong.”

He insisted he’s the only Republican who’s tough enough to clean up Albany, saying of his GOP opponents, that one would do it with a whisk broom and the other with a mop.

He added, “Me? I’ll clean up Albany with a baseball bat.”

Subtle.

Now he’s vowed to spend millions of his own money to get himself on the ballot. Fortunately for the nominee and the Republican establishment, Mr. Lazio has already sewn up the Conservative Party’s nomination as well, preventing a three-way contest that would virtually hand the election to Mr. Cuomo.